Slovak accession

We are writing at a time when the Slovak Republic is on the doorstep of the European Union. Together with the large majority of our fellow citizens, we have waited for this moment with great enthusiasm.

We do highly appreciate that the European Union is offering membership to our country, among others, as an acknowledgement of Slovakia’s performance in the respect for, and promotion of, the common European values of the rule of law, democracy, the protection of human and minority rights.

The immense moral strength in joining the community of states, which based their integration on the fundamental values of democracy and the respect for human rights, offers great opportunities and poses significant challenges to the new members.

These challenges must be faced by the Union too, as there is no way of justifying the membership of a country in which there are still existing injustices committed by the state against its own citizens.

Our association is deeply concerned about remedying the injustices committed in the former Czechoslovakia against the citizens of Slovakia. The former Czechoslovak state and its successor states, both the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, have a moral responsibility to compensate citizens who were deported in the period of 1939-45.

Today, it is time to compensate those citizens, who were also deported from Slovakia to the Czech territory in 1946-47 and forced into labour. The governmental administration implementing the law at that time in various aspects roughly violated legal norms.

Citizens of southern Slovakia became victims in large numbers: there were approximately 11,568 families, (43,546 people) affected. Inhuman conditions and treatment resulted in a lot of human victims and a lot of family tragedies that consequently caused lasting bodily harm. To date, these victims have not received any moral satisfaction, not to mention compensation of material losses.

Even today, the Slovak government does not acknowledge any wrongdoing in this regard, and denies the state’s responsibility, while thousands of people, mostly elderly men and women, citizens of the Slovak Republic, are left in a state of injustice.

In the past ten years it seems to have become an established practice in Europe that states offer compensations to those who suffered serious injustice.

The government of the Slovak Republic similarly acknowledged the right to compensation of all those citizens who were victims of deportation.

We are aware of the fact that, in strict legal terms, the European Union may not have competence on issues which originated well before the establishment of the European Community. Nevertheless, we are also aware of the great moral and political authority of the EU.

On behalf of the association of deportation victims and their descendants, I appeal to the EU’s well-known and deserved international reputation as defenders of human rights to consider to employ its reputation and moral authority to find adequate ways to persuade the Czech and Slovak governments to reconsider their position on the matter in order to achieve (at least moral) compensation for all those who have suffered injustices.

We are convinced that the Czech Republic and Slovakia can only be honoured and respected members of the Union if they do not tolerate any kind of discrimination among their citizens.